Tag Archives: Cinderella

It’s that time of year again, when countless innocent pumpkins, their one night of jack-o-lantern glory past and gone, are unceremoniously dumped into the compost bin. Ah, the melancholy…

I can’t help but be reminded of the pumpkin shards littering the road as Cinderella limps home, one glass slipper still left on her foot, supremely indifferent to her dress that hangs in rags on her or the rain that streams down her head, as she is still lost in happy memories of the ball and the prince. In both of the Disney films the pumpkin comes to a quite spectacular end, splattering to pieces under the hooves of the palace guard in frantic pursuit of the mysterious princess.

Interestingly enough, I didn’t encounter the pumpkin in the Cinderella tale until I came to Canada and watched the Disney cartoon, which is modelled on Perrault’s telling of the story. The Grimms’ version of “Cinderella”, which is what I grew up with, hasn’t got a pumpkin in it; Aschenputtel gets to the ball on foot. She’s a much more independent sort than Perrault’s French court lady. There also isn’t a fairy godmother, not really. Aschenputtel’s fairy, umm, god-creatures are a pair of turtle doves that live in the tree on her mother’s grave (and peck out the stepsisters’ eyes during the grand finale – yeah, there might be a reason Disney went with the Perrault version).

Pumpkins aren’t too prolific in fairy tale land, but Perrault is by no means the only one who uses them. Another tale that brings in pumpkins, in an interesting juxtaposition with roses, no less, is Clemens Brentano’s “The Legend of Rosepetal”. Brentano was a contemporary of the Brothers Grimm, one of the chief members of German Romanticism. He wrote various fairy tale collections, and his tales are cited as prime examples of the literary fairy tale. However, his Italian Fairy Tales, of which “The Legend of Rose Petal” is one, are actually adaptations of Giambattista Basile’sPentamerone – in other words, Brentano didn’t “write” them, per se, but took existing tales and retold them. Basile’s version of “The Legend of Rosepetal” is called “La schiavottella”, “The Kitchen Maid” – but Brentano expanded the tale, and, what’s of greater interest to us here, added pumpkins.

The story comes in two parts. Part One begins with the Duke of Rosmital, whose beautiful sister Rosalina is only interested in roses and having her hair combed. Prince Foreverandever wants to marry Rosalina, but she’s having none of it – “That’d be like a rose marrying a pumpkin!” Ouch.

But the prince isn’t so easily put off. He goes to an enchantress, who works things so he becomes a rose bush, which she presents to the princess as a seedling stuck inside a pumpkin to keep fresh. The princess, of course, wants the rose bush to plant in front of her window. But first, the enchantress makes her eat a few spoonsful of pumpkin seed and promise to do a monthly game of “Jump Over the Rose Bush”. The princess agrees to anything, no matter how weird, just to get a hold of that rose bush. Of course, during her very first game, she knocks a rose petal off the bush, which she quickly catches hold of and swallows. Ooops!

“Now you’ve done it,” says the enchantress. “You’ve swallowed pumpkin and rose – so now you’re married to Prince Foreverandever. See ya!” And off she goes. Rosalina passes out from shock, and the next night she dreams she has a rose bush growing from her mouth.

The next month, when the bush has another rose blooming, the princess isn’t feeling so good. By the third month, she keeps having dreams of turning into a pumpkin, which become more and more intrusive, until finally, by month nine, she is convinced she’s a pumpkin, and that she’s going to die! (Yeah, that’s one way of describing it…) What do you know, when she wakes up, beside her bed there’s half a pumpkin, in which lies a beautiful baby girl whom she names Rosepetal.

Part Two: We’ll skip over a few things. Suffice to say, this is where the story turns “Snow White”, “Bluebeard”, and “Cinderella” at once. Little Rosepetal grows up. Mommy gets jealous of her, and in her rage accidentally kills her kid by stabbing her in the head with a comb. Oh dear. She has the girl put in a glass coffin and kept in a spare bedroom, and then she and the rose bush at her window both die from grief.

Rosalina’s brother (the duke from the beginning of the story) marries a nasty woman. One day, she opens the door of the forbidden chamber and finds the girl in the glass coffin. She takes out the comb and wakes the girl, Snow-White-style, and then goes all Cinderella and makes the girl her slave, making her do dirty work and abusing her. Eventually, to carry on the Cinderella theme, Rose Petal asks the duke to bring her a gift from the market.

The gift (a little doll) is the instrument of the duke’s finding out the truth about his niece and his wife. He kicks out the wife, finds a princely husband for Rosepetal, and in the end, Rosepetal even sees her parents, Rosalina and Prince Foreverandever-the-Rosebush. She gets their blessings on a life of Happily Ever After, and they waft off into the ether. Shortly thereafter, a little prince is born, and he, Brentano says, told this story to him for nothing more than a piece of gingerbread. The End.

Cute, isn’t it? Basile’s version is very similar, but without the pumpkin. And presumably the gingerbread at the end.

Personally, I like this version. However, I’ll skip the gingerbread, but I’ll make a pie out of my leftover jack-o-lantern. Pumpkin pie is really easy to make. Here’s how:

Method:
Whiz all and sundry in food processor, dump into crust, bake for 45-55 minutes or until filling puffs evenly all the way to the center.
Remove from oven, cool on rack, serve with whipped cream.

Observe minute of silence for memory of jack-o-lantern or of Prince Foreverandever.

“Lavender’s Blue”, the Septimus Series Short Story that I posted the other day (if you haven’t read it yet, go here, or here and download yourself a copy to keep), started with a song – well, actually, with a movie. That’s right, the Cinderella movie that I love so much.

The lullabye “Lavender’s Blue” features quite prominently in the film, and so afterwards, I had the song stuck in my head.And as I kept singing it, and thinking about Cat and Guy and the world they live in, a story started taking shape in my head. Voilà, “Lavender’s Blue”.

And here is the song (well, one version of it – it’s a folk song, so there are lots of different versions. The one Cat sings has a slightly different last line).

Okay, the second slide holder is in. Lights off, here we go (chick-chook):

Palaces aren’t the only buildings that were dripping with gilding and marble in the Baroque. This is the Abbey Church of Fürstenfeld, outside of Munich, which was one of the strongholds of the Counter Reformation. They pulled out all the stops to convince the people that the Catholic church was worth sticking with. Speaking of pulling out all the stops, we got to hear an organ concert here – it was fantastic.

Yes, that’s a dead guy. A 1900-year-old dead guy, to be precise – St. Hyacinth, who starved to death at the age of 12 around the year 100 AD because he refused to eat meat that had been sacrificed to idols. You can tell that his weight loss program was effective. But at least he got impressive duds out of the deal, even if it was a millennium or two after the fact.

Munich has several world famous art museums. I took the time out to visit the Neue Pinakothek, which holds a selection of 19th-century art – well, from the late 18th century to the early 20th. I was thrilled to find that there were several pieces by Angelica Kauffmann – for example, this, her most famous self-portrait. She’s got to be awesome with a name like that, no?

If anyone doubts that the “Cinderella” story is a perennial favourite, they have obviously not been attending a movie theatre in the last week since the release of the live-action film. We went on Tuesday evening, the first cheap Tuesday after the movie came out, and the theatre was packed – the show must have been nearly sold out.

One of the things I loved about it was the demographic of the audience. Sure, there were lots of families with young children. But the middle of the front row was occupied by a group of half a dozen seniors, and they were by no means the only grey heads unaccompanied by grandchildren there. We originally sat at the end of a row beside two more empty seats; we gave up our spots and moved to a different row so a foursome of young adults – again, no children in sight – could sit together. The full age range of viewers was represented in that theatre. There was noise, bustling, rustling, chattering – and then the film started to roll, and it got quiet. A little voice somewhere in the front of the theatre piped up “It’s Cinderella!”

And so it was. This movie is a beautifully quintessential rendition of the Cinderella story, a straight-up, classic fairy tale version. No attempts here to modernise, to give tragic backstories to the villains to make them into non-villains, to make Cinderella into a 21st-century feminist icon, to subvert the base story into a lesson in, umm, the moral-du-jour. I found that aspect of the film quite refreshing – it’s a fairy tale. The characters are as flat as they are in the printed versions. Cinderella is sweet, beautiful and picked-on; the stepmother and -sisters are mean bullies; the prince is charming; the fairy godmother is magical. That flatness, what the folklorist Max Lüthi calls depthlessness, is one of the key characteristics of folktales, and Sir Kenneth Branagh did a fantastic job making a film that retains this one-dimensionality while harnessing the full empowering force of this tale.

Yes. I wore this to the movie.

But you probably just want me to get down to it and tell you what I thought. Well, here it is: I loved it. This is hands-down my favourite “Cinderella” movie yet. The visuals and special effects are stunning. The way the film plays with colour is especially striking – in fact, I wonder if they cast Richard Madden as the Prince purely for the way his brilliantly blue eyes match Cinderella’s gown. Every pretty girl ought to have a prince with matching eyes to accessorize with. (To which my daughter commented: “Good thing Cinderella doesn’t have a penchant for wearing red.”) The visuals, the acting, the storytelling, the sheer fairy-tale-ism of it all – it’s a wonderful movie.

Speaking of acting, one pleasant surprise was Sir Derek Jacobi in the role of the Prince’s father (or, I should say, one of the pleasures of the movie; it wasn’t really a surprise, this being a Branagh film). Now, this is a Disney movie, and as such, gives more than a nod to the 1950 animated version (more on that in a minute). But the King, whom the older movie portrays as nothing more than an old-fashioned buffoon obsessed with getting grandchildren, is a changed character here. Oh, Derek Jacobi would be more than capable of bringing a comic role like that to the screen. But the King he plays in this film is a very different character, and in fact (SPOILER ALERT!), the scene of him lying in his great big bed dying, with his grown son curled up against his chest begging him not to go, is one of the most touching parts of the movie.

Dying parents do feature rather prominently in this version of the story. Having Cinderella’s mother die is, of course, a prerequisite to the whole plot. But like in almost all other film versions (and as opposed to the written tales), her father is killed off as well (today’s society can’t deal with the idea that he might still be around but perhaps doesn’t actually care that his second wife abuses his daughter); and then here we have the new twist of a deep, loving relationship between the Prince and the King, only to give the latter a death scene, too. All of those scenes are played very sensitively and deeply emotional, with beautiful acting on everyone’s part. However, because of this I’d be cautious about taking really sensitive young children to see the movie – I know I would have found those aspects of the story quite disturbing when I was little (yes, I hated Bambi, too). (Note: if your kid is okay with watching The Lion King, they can probably handle this. If not, I’d wait for it to come out on DVD so you can fast-forward.)

However, this is “Cinderella”, and we all know how this story goes. The Ball!! The Fairy Godmother!! The Gown!! The Prince!! The Slipper!! Oh, yes, this movie delivers on that – does it ever! It’s every fairy tale fantasy brought to life on the big screen in glorious oversized colour. The slipper alone is a dazzling piece of facetted crystal, and in spite of appearances, as the Fairy Godmother says, “You’ll find it’s really comfortable!”

Said Fairy Godmother is wonderful, as was fully to be expected – she is played by Helena Bonham Carter. The transformation scenes of pumpkin and mice and lizards to coach and horses and footmen are the most hilarious parts of the whole movie. Fairy Godmother isn’t the brightest – the pumpkin in question is inside a greenhouse, and she decides that that’s a perfectly adequate location for casting the spell to change it into a coach. Let’s just say that, contrary to expectations, getting the finished product out the door actually isn’t a problem.

I enjoyed this movie on so many levels, not the least of which is that it makes quite a few references to the various versions of the “Cinderella” story. The main source text, as I mentioned before, is (of course) the 1950 Disney cartoon, which in turn is based on the Perrault version of the written tale. However, there is also a reference to the Grimm’s tale (Cinderella asks her father to bring her back a branch from a tree), to the Czech/German cult classic film Drei Haselnüsse für Aschenbrödel, to Gail Carson Levine’s book Ella Enchanted… Perhaps I’m reading those references into the film and they are actually unintentional, but as a bona fide fairy tale nerd who just wrote a Master’s Thesis on this very thing I enjoyed spotting them.

I could go on and on about this – I haven’t even mentioned some of the other fabulous characters, such as Cate Blanchett’s deliciously wicked stepmother, or the gorgeous score (it’s by Patrick Doyle. Patrick Doyle, people! Branagh’s Henry V and Much Ado About Nothing! The Emma Thompson Sense and Sensibility!). But I think it’s time to stop gushing – I think you get the picture. The motion picture, no less. If you want to immerse yourself in one wonderful fairy tale experience, get thee to a cinema.